


Fondly

by magikfanfic



Category: Naruto
Genre: M/M, Mutual Pining, however i still don't really go here so forgive me any inaccuracies on things, mentions of sexual situations, mostly i intend to come for your tender feelings whenever possible, probably not canon compliant, set after the eighth gate incident
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-08 05:55:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18888523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magikfanfic/pseuds/magikfanfic
Summary: Eight is supposed to be the last number. Eight is supposed to be the end.





	Fondly

**Author's Note:**

> Once again, I barely know anything about Naruto, but that doesn't stop the feels from coming. So while this might not be canon accurate, hopefully, it's at least enjoyable.

Kakashi is perched on a tree, watching, when he finally completely understands the full meaning of the Gates. He’s a genius, and it shouldn’t have taken him this long but maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t wanted to know. You idiot, he thinks, angrier at Gai than he has ever managed to be, needing to be my rival in everything. Even death wishes, apparently.

Only, no, that’s not quite it, because Kakashi knows that Maito Gai is not rushing headlong into hopeless things seeking oblivion, seeking absolution. Gai doesn’t need that. Gai doesn’t have the same list of failures staring him down from the darkness behind his eyes the way that Kakashi does. Gai doesn’t need a death wish because it is a death wish. Gai has the Gates so that he can die valiantly. A hero. 

Kakashi hates heroes, hates self-sacrifice in other people, but can’t bring himself to hate Gai. He just adds to it the list of “things I love Gai in spite of” (and not because of he tells himself even if it might be a lie some of the time, never because of). The list includes the green jumpsuit, the boisterous voice, the nice guy poses, the teeth, the hair, the laughter, the bravado that never, ever fades even when it should, even when Gai should be terrified. It’s a long list, really. Anyone else might think that it’s long enough nothing could outweigh it.

Except.

The list for “things I love about Gai” has only one entry. It only needs one entry. It only ever did need one.

Gai. 

An entry that outweighs everything.

***

Eight is supposed to be the last number. Eight is supposed to be the end.

Only it’s not, and Kakashi isn’t sure how to reconcile that fact when he wakes every single day on the verge of a panic attack because what if Gai being alive is the dream and the reality will be the nightmare of Gai having finally left him. Like everyone else. And without him ever even having said the truth.

He startles awake, time after time, in Gai’s hospital room with the incessant beeping. He brandishes kunai that the hospital staff knows better than to try and take away. He yells himself awake and then has to turn away from the soft, sympathetic stares that meet his worried gaze. Everyone knows better than to talk to him about what he’s doing. Everyone knows better than to say a word other than to reassure him that Gai is still there; he might not be awake yet, but he is still there, and his heart is strong and he is breathing and his body just needs a little more time.

Kakashi sits in the chair he pulled right up next to the side of the bed so close he can prop his head on the edge of it when no one is looking and wonders whether Gai is with his tortoises, wandering through some haze, having some adventure. He wonders if Gai misses him wherever he is while he isn’t really here. 

“You could talk to him,” Sakura says. 

Kakashi doesn’t even look at her.

“He can probably hear you.”

What she doesn’t say but what Kakashi can hear in her tone is, it might help you even if it can’t heal him.

Other than the screaming himself awake, Kakashi hasn’t really spoken since they brought Gai in here. Shock, some of the hospital staff have said, but Kakashi is afraid of speaking something into existence so he keeps his mouth closed. If he’s in charge of speaking Gai back into existence, he’ll fuck it up. He’ll call him back wrong. He’ll call him back as something other than Gai, and that is. Not what Kakashi wants or needs. And. Well.

He doesn’t know Gai needs. He should, but he can’t quite seem to figure it out. Turns out, when it’s needed the most, he’s no genius at all.

So, he just shuts up and sits there and doesn’t touch Gai’s skin because it looks like every single bit of flesh probably hurts him. Kakashi has seen him open Gates before. Kakashi has steered him home and forced him to drink tea and watched Gai seem to shrink his body away from his own clothing, from the air around him, and Kakashi had winced inwardly and pretended not to look. Then he had swirled aloe across Gai’s body with fingers soft and careful like feathers and neither of them talked about the quiet kisses they would place against each other’s cheeks. Those were lesser Gates. Kakashi cannot imagine what Gai might be feeling now if he can feel anything at all. He watches the pain medication drip through the IV into Gai’s veins. It’s not just that he’s sleeping; it’s also that he’s sedated until they’ve healed him enough to pour him back into whatever is left of his body.

Kakashi has heard Gai cry over many things, but he’s not sure how he could stand to see Gai reduced to weeping over pain. He’s not sure Gai would want him to see that, either, but he’s not leaving so. Eventually, it’s going to happen. Maybe. If they ever slacken the dosage, if the tortoises ever bring him back.

Is there anyone else with a tortoise pact? How could he locate them? Could they even tell him anything at all?

He props his arms on the side of Gai’s bed and lays his head on them and breathes in and tries not to think about how he thinks he can smell burned flesh under the insurmountably large amounts of antiseptic.

Closing his eyes, he thinks about them in Gai’s bathroom, Gai’s clothing a puddle at their feet, Kakashi’s fingers tender with the aloe, the intake of Gai’s breathe not just from pain, the sound Gai makes when Kakashi nuzzles his masked lips against his hardness, Gai’s fingers gentle in his hair until Kakashi himself reached up to remind them to grip harder.

***

They scale the pain meds down finally, and Gai struggles to the surface not even twenty minutes later. Like he was waiting. Like he is indomitable. He comes to coughing and groaning with none of his flash and pizzaz; he comes back to life like any other man. 

And Kakashi is so mad that he cannot even speak, cannot even look at him, just sits in the corner and glares. Sakura looks at him the way that people look at blights on the face of humanity, and, oh, Kakashi agrees, but he cannot manage anything else.

If it hurts Gai, he doesn’t make a sign, but then Kakashi knows that Maito Gai has always been good at suffering true pain in silence. They’re both adept at that.

It takes three days for Kakashi to speak. Three days of him sitting there, arms folded, still right on the edge of Gai’s orbit, held there, unable to move, unable to do anything save doze off and then jerk himself awake, still positive that he’ll open his eyes and find the bed empty, Gai gone, laid out in a morgue or, worse, already burned and scattered, leaving Kakashi’s hands empty, cold, once again.

He startles himself awake, breathing hard, unable to make the room come to focus, and the only thing that keeps him from attacking when the fingers come to brush through his hair is the fact that he recognizes the chakra signature. Gai. Something inside of him bursts like a pipe. 

“What the fuck were you doing?” It’s out, and it’s hard, and it’s cold, and it is so angry that Kakashi barely recognizes his own voice. He certainly doesn’t recognize the way it wavers as though it hurts. 

Gai doesn’t stop touching him because Gai has always been foolhardy. “What needed doing. For the world.”

Kakashi’s head is swimming with the sort of corny lines he’d chuckle at in his books, but which feel true at this moment even if he doesn’t think he can get them out. You’re worth more than the world. The world doesn’t deserve your sacrifice. I don’t deserve you. I don’t want to do this without you.

Stay with me.

Instead, he says nothing, and Gai’s fingers are slow through his hair and down the nape of his neck. They move like they are caught in something heavy like honey, so much slower than Kakashi is used to Gai moving. Maybe it’s just the medication. Maybe it’s the injuries. Or maybe this is just how Gai will be now. After.

“What were you hoping for?” Kakashi lifts his head now, to look. The room is dark, it’s the middle of the night, but he doesn’t modulate his voice. He’s not being loud, really, it just feels like he’s yelling. His voice sounds rough from disuse. 

Gai looks rough from misuse. 

Neither of them are men who can be gentle to themselves.

Gai if you let me, Kakashi thinks but cannot say, I will be gentle to you now and however long is left. This, too, is sentimental crap that gets swallowed down rather than bubbling out and up to where, maybe, it could soothe them.

Perhaps there is rather a lot of the pain meds left in Gai’s system because he does not strike a nice guy pose or grin or wax poetic about eternal youth. He runs a thumb over Kakashi’s mask where his lower lip is in a way that twists like a kunai in Kakashi’s gut. “To be remembered fondly.”

Kakashi wonders, sometimes, whether the Sharingan ruined his tear ducts, whether his actions in life have destroyed his soul, but there is a haze of tears across his vision, and his throat feels like it’s closing with something. He thinks of Gai as a child, looked over, scorned. He thinks of Dai, the village joke. But Gai is not his father, and neither is he that boy that no one thought would amount to anything. He is Maito Gai, and he has saved them from destruction time and again with his body as the last stop-gap measure, always.

Both of them live in the shadows of men they are not. 

Neither of them are their fathers. Both of them have proven, time and again, that they are stronger than that. 

Kakashi catches Gai’s hand and pulls it toward him carefully, gently, watching for any sign of discomfort. Gai offers it as openly as he has ever offered anything, which is everything. Gai has always offered him everything; it’s Kakashi who been too afraid to take anything except the barest scraps of affection.

He places a kiss on Gai’s hand for each Gate that has tried to take him away. He lingers long on the eighth one, feels the tears leak out to trail over Gai’s hand, which squeezes into his own because even just barely back from the brink of death Gai is focused on comforting him. Was there ever a man like this in all the world before? Will there ever be one again?

Then he kisses once more, a ninth, a new gate. A gate that he opens, one of his own, the one that Gai has been waiting beside for more years than Kakashi feels comfortable counting. 

Grabbing the healing salve for Gai’s skin from the side table, Kakashi crowds his way into the bed and begins to methodically rub the ointment in bit by bit on patches of uncovered skin. He doesn’t flinch from any of the devastations; he’s already seen it, after all, and none of it matters. Gai will not be held back by any of it. His spirit is indomitable. 

“I remember this,” Kakashi says as each bit of skin is revealed, as his fingers massage the gel in, as Gai releases soft sighs. “I remember this,” fingers under the curve of his knee. “I remember this,” feather-light caresses against his inner thighs and higher, where he presses a kiss and Gai moans his name in a way that Kakashi will endeavor to reclaim again and again and again until neither of them has breath anymore. “And this,” fingertips on the expanse of Gai’s abdomen. “I remember this,” he curls his hands over Gai’s chest, feels his heart shuddering away below, so strong and yet almost lost, sacred, “fondly.”

Kakashi doesn’t know when he starts crying again, but he knows that his sorrow turns to something like shaky, newborn joy when Gai turns his face up and kisses him over the mask.

When he fights his own hands to push the fabric aside, to claim kisses that are skin to skin, Gai’s tentative fingers on his cheek, touching as though he is the one battered, almost dead, make his breath stick in his throat.

“I remember this,” Gai says, and there is wonder and awe in his voice.

Kakashi cannot count how many years it’s been since he showed Gai his face. Even when they’ve been intimate a handful of times, he’s kept that boundary, kept up that gate. It’s shattered now, the bricks are all around him. He feels shaken, naked, vulnerable; it’s nothing near as cataclysmic as the way he felt when he saw the energy that heralded Gai’s Eighth Gate, though. Nothing in the world has shaken him as much as that did. 

“I remember you,” Gai says, thumb tracing Kakashi’s lips now, not the mask, not the facsimile of his face, but the actual one, which he nearly ducks away because how can one man hold so many emotions in his eyes, in his body; how can Kakashi be expected to face it and not drown in it. 

“Fondly?” Kakashi asks because he doesn’t know what else to do, what else to say. This isn’t normal for him, emoting, knowing that something precious is in his hands and not walking away from it because that’s the easiest way to protect it.

“Oh, sometimes,” Gai says and winks.

Kakashi laughs as only Gai can make him laugh until Gai’s lips catch his own and swallow the sound, and then Kakashi kisses back, presses in, devours all of Gai’s noises, sweet and hot and just for him, lets them fill him with something warm.


End file.
